Video content can be distributed from a provider as video on demand (VOD), time-shifted television, live television, media such as a digital video disc (DVD), motion pictures distributed to theaters as digital video signals, and as electronic content distributed to computing devices. Video content can be broadcast over the air as digital signals, transmitted via satellite, and streamed, downloaded, and uploaded via communications networks such as the Internet.
Given the broad distribution of such video content and growing proliferation of viewing and playback devices for viewing such video content, providers and distributors of video content often employ video-advertising techniques to insert advertisements into video content.
Prior solutions for distributing advertisements for video content require manual steps of a publisher's sales personnel talking to an advertiser to strike deals, and creation of a report containing forecasted future inventory and indicating ads applied to this predicted inventory by an inventory management system (IMS). With traditional techniques, these steps are needed to identify available and unsold ad inventory, and to indicate where the publisher can accommodate an advertiser's campaigns. With existing IMS platforms, computations are required to fulfill each ad's daily budget target.
These prior solutions do not handle situations where sufficient ad inventory is not available on some days of a desired flight duration of an advertiser's new campaign (i.e., a campaign duration representing a time range during which ads of the campaign are to be served by an ad server). In such cases, deals may not go through. Reports generated by existing IMS platforms are static, and as a result, sales personnel cannot interact with the reports to attempt to dynamically re-distribute or re-adjust an ad delivery plan based on a simulation of existing, planned campaigns. As such, existing techniques are often unable to accommodate new campaign requirements of advertisers. As a result, sales personnel and agents may not be able to commit to the needs of advertisers in cases when adjustment/re-distribution of future delivery plans of existing campaigns are required.
Therefore, there is a need for improved ad management technique.